File Room

Dayanita Singh’s File Room is an elegy to paper in the age of the digitization of information and knowledge. The analogue
photographer and bookmaker has a unique relationship with paper that is integral not only to the work of making of
images, texts and memory, but also to a larger confrontation with chaos, mortality and disorder in the labyrinths of
working bureaucratic archives in a country of more than a billion people. The endless rows of files in Indian courts,
municipal offices, state archives and other such institutions for the conservation of human data create monuments to
knowledge and to the arts of memory. They have their own atmosphere and architecture, rooted both in history and in
the present. Archivists spend their lives organizing and conserving these forests of paper; historians and scholars
forage in them for voices from the past; and the lives of ordinary men and women get entangled in the bureaucratic and
litigious systems with their own copiousness of paperwork and files.
Including an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist that relates this book with Singh’s other books and bodies of work, and
texts by Aveek Sen that explore the different ways in which the mad world of files and paperwork continue to touch
ordinary lives, File Room is itself an archive of archives. It documents, and reflects on, the nature of paper as material
and symbol in the work of making photographs and books.